Below is the complete list of Story Lake books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series by Lucy Score.
Story Lake Series
- Story of My Life (2025)
- Mistakes Were Made (2026)
About Story Lake Series
Lucy Score’s Story Lake books begin as a new small-town romance series rather than a completed multi-book saga, and that matters for how the series is best understood. The official framing of Story of My Life presents it as the start of the Story Lake series, built around Hazel Hart, a romance novelist with severe writer’s block who impulsively buys a historic house in tiny Story Lake, Pennsylvania, and finds herself pulled into the life of a struggling town.
What makes the series promising from the start is that Story Lake is clearly meant to function as more than a backdrop. The setup is classic Lucy Score in one sense: a heroine in personal freefall, a town full of interference and opinions, and a situation that forces her out of isolation and into messy community life. But Story Lake also has a stronger reinvention theme than some of her earlier small-town worlds. Hazel is not simply arriving for romance. She is arriving because her life and work have stalled, and the town becomes the place where both are forced back into motion. That gives the opening book a slightly different emotional shape from a pure enemies-to-lovers or neighbors-to-lovers launch.
The first book also establishes one of Score’s most reliable strengths: the way she builds a town as an engine for story. Story Lake is struggling after the loss of its biggest employer, Hazel’s newly purchased home is a wreck, and her accidental position on the town council means she cannot remain a detached outsider. Those details matter because they suggest the series will be driven not only by individual relationships but by local crisis, town politics, and the kind of communal chaos that Score handles especially well. The romantic arc may anchor each book, but the series identity is likely to come from the town itself and the people trying to hold it together.
Because the series is just beginning, publication order matters in a straightforward way. There is no older backlog to rearrange, no spin-off confusion, and no second-generation crossover to untangle. The cleanest way to read Story Lake is simply to start at the beginning and follow the series as it grows. That first-book position matters more than usual because Story of My Life is clearly doing foundational work: introducing the town, establishing its economic and emotional condition, and creating the social web that later books are likely to build on.
Tonally, Story Lake looks like a good fit for readers who enjoy Lucy Score when she is working in her warm, community-heavy mode. The official description explicitly compares the book’s feel to a mix of fish-out-of-water reinvention and eccentric small-town life, and Hazel’s arrival in Story Lake already promises the combination of romance, public mess, and reluctant belonging that tends to power Score’s most satisfying series worlds. Rather than opening with a polished heroine fully in control of her circumstances, the series starts with a woman at a breaking point, which usually means the emotional payoff has more room to deepen.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about Story Lake is as the beginning of a new Lucy Score small-town world rather than a finished series to categorize all at once. The first book lays the groundwork for that world through Hazel’s collapse, her move, the battered old house, and a town that needs help almost as badly as she does. Read in order from the start, the series offers the chance to watch that world take shape book by book instead of arriving after it is already complete.